And that's the problem with a Project that takes weekends off and seems to treat the tasks as 'a nice thing but not necessary to get done today and not tomorrow is okay too'. It's just life at Rosetta and has been that way for a very long time.

It is probably in the nature of the work they send out to us. It is model development as I understand it. But they apparently do the actual folding and design of the proteins themselves.
So if we are out of work for a while, they don't really see the effects. They just make it up by sending out more work later.

Yup that's my impressions too.

You can hope, but anything better than what I said before would pleasantly surprise me

The week of Monday 4th January is favourite now - and not the beginning of that week either.

In fact, in some years, stop-start supply problems have continued to the end of January, though given there's 11million in the pre-queue we may be spared this time.
Wish I was kidding, but past experience tells me this is what we have to expect.

And that's the problem with a Project that takes weekends off and seems to treat the tasks as 'a nice thing but not necessary to get done today and not tomorrow is okay too'. It's just life at Rosetta and has been that way for a very long time.

It's not a weekend - it's a Xmas/New Year break. Once a year, not once every week.
People deserve a proper break and I'm not inclined to demand they're dragged in to suit, what are essentially, hobbyists.
I have no idea how anyone gets the idea their priorities are more relaxed than ours. How condescending. I don't doubt for a second it's entirely the other way round.

The impression I do get is users think the project's work starts when tasks are downloaded and ends when they're returned. Except that's our job, not theirs.
It would seem obvious their work is all the preparation they do to create batches of tasks that test whatever their ideas are, then doing something with what returns and evaluating them as to what the output means and how it can be used.
That is, everything before we even see tasks, then everything after they're returned. And nothing much at all with what we do.

And that's a far better explanation of why nothing much gets done when situations like the one we have arise.

We're all here voluntarily, doing what the project needs when they need it - and if they don't need anything then we do nothing but wait for when they have a need again.
The idea that the project is here to keep our PCs fed with tasks is bonkers, tail-wagging-dog kind of crazy - and I don't know why people would ever think otherwise.
But people do and start coming out with stuff about "community" and "Rosetta is us", which I will always find head-shakingly bizarre #Cranks

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People deserve a proper break and I'm not inclined to demand they're dragged in to suit, what are essentially, hobbyists.

No need to go in, just do a remote login & restart. If it fixes it, good. If not, then it can wait till they do go in.

But people do and start coming out with stuff about "community" and "Rosetta is us", which I will always find head-shakingly bizarre #Cranks

Which is probably why Rosetta is such a small project- that very lack of community.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Which is probably why Rosetta is such a small project- that very lack of community.

Very true Grant (SSSF). Switched my CPU threads to Folding@Home. If they don't care much, why should we bother.

I know it's the holidays but an official word would have made all the difference, people wasting time troubleshooting their clients, rebooting systems, etc. lol

People deserve a proper break and I'm not inclined to demand they're dragged in to suit, what are essentially, hobbyists.

No need to go in, just do a remote login & restart. If it fixes it, good. If not, then it can wait till they do go in.

No need to do anything at all. Honestly, this is not some critical service they are running, it's a BOINC project, if it's down for a couple of days or even weeks, nothing will change except that they might need to publish some papers a bit later. Nothing, that I would expect anyone of them to regularly interrupt their vacation to check if the servers are running OK. That's not a vacation than anymore.

I know it's the holidays but an official word would have made all the difference, people wasting time troubleshooting their clients, rebooting systems, etc. lol

If people are wasting time for this instead of simply checking the server status page, what makes you think they will check if there are some other type of news about it? The "official word" regarding tasks ready to send is already there, updating every 10 minutes or so, people just need to read it.

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Sure, people are just donating hardware, time, power bills and more for free. Gee, we owe Rosetta everything and should be grateful that they are giving us some numbers to crunch. Lord forbidd some one took 10 minutes to do a remote log on just to see if it was an easy fix some where. Or wrote a couple ow words on the home page on why idling CPUs is a good thing.

News flash, Rosetta needs us, we do not need Rosetta. If Rosetta does not want to engage in the community then there is no community. Apparently there is so much hardware for Rosetta that they do not need any more. And reading some of the comments here it looks like it would be a burden for Rosetta to get more hardware to crunch numbers on. So do like I did, took my computer offline and uninstalled Boinc. Best advice Sid Celery has ever given.

So do like I did, took my computer offline and uninstalled Boinc. Best advice Sid Celery has ever given.

Tasks for computer 4415639
Interesting, you don't seem to have run out of tasks, 14 still in progress, but uninstalled BOINC because servers are not sending new ones?

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In fact, in some years, stop-start supply problems have continued to the end of January, though given there's 11million in the pre-queue we may be spared this time.
Wish I was kidding, but past experience tells me this is what we have to expect.

I'm here since 2005 and i remember these issues.
Without ANY communication from staff (forum, FB, Twitter, etc), it's the right way to lose volunteers...

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nothing will change

When people come here wanting to help, and find the project unreliable and the community unfriendly, they go elsewhere. After a project loses the goodwill of its volunteers, where does it get the computing resources it needs?

So do like I did, took my computer offline and uninstalled Boinc. Best advice Sid Celery has ever given.

Tasks for computer 4415639
Interesting, you don't seem to have run out of tasks, 14 still in progress, but uninstalled BOINC because servers are not sending new ones?

They were running when I paused the project, removed the project and then uninstalled Boinc. I guess there is a time out before Rosetta realizes there are nothing coming in return and the tasks get listed as failed.

because servers are not sending new ones?

No: because he got an exceptionally rude response to a perfectly reasonable comment :-⁠(

Which is probably why Rosetta is such a small project- that very lack of community.

On WCG, for example, they publish news if they have to update/maintenance servers, so people are "advised" and not waste their time to understand what is going on

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nothing will change

When people come here wanting to help, and find the project unreliable and the community unfriendly, they go elsewhere. After a project loses the goodwill of its volunteers, where does it get the computing resources it needs?

True. This is my experience. The project do not care and the "community" is toxic. Why should I then devote time, hardware and my power bill to the project?

Not that it is that important any more with the results from AlphaFold2.

the "community" is toxic

The ‘welcome’ you received was uncharacteristically hostile. It’s not usually that bad here…

Why should I then devote time, hardware and my power bill to the project?

Because you want to contribute to the science – and as inefficient as Rosetta might be, doing even a tiny thing that might improve human health feels more worthwhile than searching for aliens in random noise, or cracking crypto, or inventing imaginary money, or whatever it is that other distributed computing projects are doing…

Not that it is that important any more with the results from AlphaFold2

Short-term it seems unlikely that the Baker Lab and friends are going to drop Rosetta, having invested so much time and energy into it. But it does feel as though the writing is on the wall…

Not that it is that important any more with the results from AlphaFold2.

Well, no.
AlphaFold2 is great and fantastic, but it does only one thing.
Rosetta is still necessary for all the other things.
The way is still long....

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AlphaFold2 is great and fantastic, but it does only one thing.
Rosetta is still necessary for all the other things.
The way is still long....

Yes.
But at some point Rosetta will have to take AI into account, either by incorporating it into the work they send us or by doing it in-house.
That is OK, but how much warning will we get? I know, we don't need much warning to change BOINC projects. And that is what we will get.

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People deserve a proper break and I'm not inclined to demand they're dragged in to suit, what are essentially, hobbyists.

No need to go in, just do a remote login & restart. If it fixes it, good. If not, then it can wait till they do go in.

If it wasn't for people in these forums, no-one would've thought of this...

But people do and start coming out with stuff about "community" and "Rosetta is us", which I will always find head-shakingly bizarre #Cranks

Which is probably why Rosetta is such a small project - that very lack of community.

Right, it's the "community" that motivates people to join and contribute to projects and hang around.
Not even sure what "community" means in this context. Traffic in forums by a few dozen people?
The kind of community that, when tasks stop coming down in the middle of a Xmas holiday, immediately sees comments about the loss of good will? Some "community".
Is this some kind of joke I'm not getting? Even though I'm laughing anyway?
Astonishing self-obsession and lack of proportionality.

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Sure, people are just donating hardware, time, power bills and more for free

Yes.
Except the 2nd sentence of your 1st post in these forums was about a loss of "good will" which you'd never established in the first place.
And a few messages later, in response to entirely plan, honest and accurate replies, if disappointing, you were trying to claim it as a loss of community.
At which point you immediately detach and send indignant PMs around. So much for it being about community and not entirely about you.
Which you confirm by sending huffy forum posts even after you detached. Using the word "we" of all things.

Really, you're not making yourself look any more justified. Rather, it's self-indulgent and pathetic.

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AlphaFold2 is great and fantastic, but it does only one thing.
Rosetta is still necessary for all the other things.
The way is still long....

Yes.
But at some point Rosetta will have to take AI into account, either by incorporating it into the work they send us or by doing it in-house.
That is OK, but how much warning will we get? I know, we don't need much warning to change BOINC projects. And that is what we will get.

I think I read somewhere that Rosetta took on board some of the first Alphafold results from a few years ago into Rosetta, before Alphafold2 took things to another level altogether.
I don't know why this would lead to Rosetta ending in some way - quite the opposite.
And, as you say, even if Rosetta were to end - something there's zero evidence of apart from random people mentioning it occasionally - switching projects is trivial.

Remind me what the issue is again? Because I couldn't see one at all.
Edit: sorry, ignore me. It wasn't you who raised it. Something from the "community" again...

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Remind me what the issue is again? Because I couldn't see one at all.

Actually, the issue is a bit obscure because I have not stated it clearly yet. It is not the day-to-day operations that I am concerned with. We can change easily.
But long term, I am interested in using my computer resources efficiently. So if Rosetta can do twice (or ten times) the work using AI, then they really don't need me so much. I can put my PC resources elsewhere. And if I know when that change is coming, I can do it in a more timely manner.

Since informing me does not necessarily do Rosetta much good, they probably don't feel much reason to keep me informed.
But for that matter, I don't need to make any assumptions about the work continuing in the normal manner either. I can make worst-case assumptions if I want to.

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